Dr. Farhad Riahi

Spearheads increased collaboration between public-sector healthcare clients and providers and leads transformation efforts at every level

About Farhad

Farhad is a leader of the Health Systems & Services Practice with expertise in health outcomes improvement and deep knowledge centered on health-system performance. He leads McKinsey’s work on pathway-based outcomes improvement across systems, payors, providers, and our work on bringing advanced-analytic tools to healthcare.

Farhad’s work focuses on improving health outcomes and improving overall health system performance through better collaboration between payors and providers. He has led performance transformation efforts at every level from hospital wards and devices to regional health economies, and worked with ministries of health on key enablers, such as medical education and workforce planning. As part of this, Farhad has developed and led capability-building programs for clinical and managerial personnel.

Recent examples of Farhad’s work include the following:

designing the strategy for a national healthcare system to develop an evidence-based plan with broad-based ownership from both clinicians and leaders of local providers and the commissioner, including a series of leadership development workshops to help the commissioner, local authority, and provider leaders improve how they work together to support implementation of sustainability and transformation plans

supporting city hospital system’s mental-health strategy, including evidence-based delivery models for community-based care, inpatient operational-efficiency improvement, and options for better redistribution of acute beds across system

helping to build an analytic tool to help clinical commissioning groups improve early diagnosis and treatment of colorectal cancer, including cost-benefit analysis of investing more in evidence-based interventions to improve screening and early detection, and modeling the implication of these for increasing diagnostic capacity

leading more than 20 outcome improvement projects across long-term conditions, mental health, and emergency care, in Brazil, China, France, the Netherlands, Russia, United Arab Emirates, and the United Kingdom

Farhad took 3 years out of his McKinsey career to build the first ever health-systems expert group in a life-sciences company. He is also a practicing physician and spends 20 percent of his time practicing medicine with native communities in northern Canada.